July Backlist Feature: Still Night in L.A.

We at Three Rooms Press firmly believe summer is a time for noir—the grittier, more hard-boiled the better for that perfect beach read. This July, we’re packing in our beach bags Aram Saroyan’s minimalist detective novel Still Night in L.A.—hailed by the Midwest Book Review as “A superbly crafted mystery from first page to last, this is a cliff-hanger of a read that will please any and all hard-boiled private eye enthusiasts.” So to kick off a gorgeous summer reading season, we’re naming Still Night in L.A. our June Backlist Feature, which means that for the entire month, this thrilling, taut mystery will be on sale on our website, at a discounted price of $10 through July 31, 2017.

Book Details:Michael Shepard, a detective with his own set of problems, is hired one morning by a fashionable young woman at her Hollywood apartment. Soon he’s embroiled in a murder investigation that may shed light on a nearly forgotten tragedy. A divorced father wondering how to set his son on a better course in life, the detective gets into deepening trouble as he negotiates a vivid panorama of the town’s modern-day beautiful and damned. Author Aram Saroyan harnesses the hardboiled styles of Chandler, Hammett, and Ross MacDonald into a contemporary tale of information age intrigue. The text is supplemented with cell phone photos taken by Saroyan in the same environs in which the story unfolds.
“Neo-noir . . . flexible enough to be a treatment for the big screen. . . The enclosed photographs also maintain the solemn mood.” —Manhattan Book Review

“Aram Saroyan has written a novella, Still Night in L.A., that moves one step further beyond the ambience of Raymond Chandler and the terseness of Raymond Carver. Best-known for his poetry, Saroyan has written a story so crisp and so cryptic that the words almost sparkle on the pages.” —Bookin’ with Sunny

“Aram Saroyan nurses the accelerator in a deceptively laconic way, channeling the faultless ratiocination of Charles Willeford (Miami Blues) and Paul Cain (Seven Slayers). STILL NIGHT IN L.A. keeps still until, at just the right moment, he floors it. —Barry Gifford, author, Wild at Heart

“Readers of California-dream-correction fiction may have their particular favourites — Day of the Locust, The Slide Area, I Should Have Stayed Home, My Face for the World To See, The Long Goodbye. Aram Saroyan’s STILL NIGHT IN L.A. brings long experience and practiced narrative craft to earn his place in this line.” —Tom Clark, author, The Exile of Celine

“STILL NIGHT is an edgy and urgent mystery in which the more that is left out, the more we are caught up in wonder. Therein lies the tension of the novel. The need to know and the author’s smart dodge, leaking only what he wants known, one page at a time. Not surprisingly this is what all great detective novels do. ” —G. A. Hausman, author, The Mythology of Horses

“STILL NIGHT IN L.A. is a novel where the magic is all in the language, in the evocation of the detective’s incongruously sweet and gentle personality, and in his astoundingly accurate takes on a world where kids have a hard time growing up before they hit middle age, and where the hard thing is not to become a movie star but to get someone to remember your name.” —Gerald Nicosia, author, Home to War: The Untold Story of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement

“Aram Saroyan’s STILL NIGHT IN L.A. cruises the mean streets and trendy brunch boites of Los Angeles, this city of angels and psychopaths. His shamus Michael Shepard is a Marlowe for our digital times.” —Richard Setlowe, author, The Haunting of Suzanna Blackwell

“Aram Saroyan’s Still Night in L.A. delivers on all platforms . . . Get out that gold statue, Edgar committee! The winner and new champion is . . . ” —Kevin Killian, Spreadeagle

“A writer who looks deeply into himself and his own experience, confronts what he finds there with real courage and reports what he has experienced with a measure of candor that is both breathtaking and, at moments, heartbreaking.”—Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times